upgrade and new approach...

well suddenly my planned new simple and easy life down under has become very complicated and hard!!!

the new rules i have to operate under seem to be pretty fixed and strict, and even worse those three criteria i need to reach before march 31 could ruin everything!

with this ticking countdown of doom i think i should start taking note of the passage of time

T-Minus: 44 days

okay there we go. good start to handling this crisis if i do say so myself... wait i did just say so myself... no if really involved.

i'm not going to lie though people of the innerweb i'm still a little lost as to what i should do to sort these things out. fortunately i know one person whose job is to make sense of such things...


i gave bond... peter bond... my special talent agent a ring (as they'd say here in new zealand) to see what he could do to help me with my problem.

now tracking down peter has been a little hard. he's been travelling around europe (a dinosaur populated place i'll point out) to increase his talent base. everywhere from germany to england, and i haven't talked to him a whole lot since his move.

he was happy to hear from me, and he launched into pleasantries. now i tried to convey to him the urgency of my call, but i didn't want to be rude... so we ended up wasting like 10 whole minutes on pleasant conversation!

man can't do that anymore. the blog clock is ticking!!!

fortunately he finally asked me "so how are you doing now that your down in new zealand?"

man it was about time. i told him not good. which naturally lead to him asking why not...

now i have a bad habit of rambling when i'm upset... it's not my fault. i do have brain the size of a peanut after all... but peter wasn't able to keep up with me, and well after wasting 2 minutes on trying to tell him i wasn't about to calm down...



fortunately i had all the regulations and rules in a text form so i just sent them to his phone...

peter was even more mad then me! all i heard was some unrepeatable in blog format words, and then "this is a total infringement on your freedom, and mine to profit off yours!!!"

now peter is a professional... he calmed himself down within 30 seconds... which i greatly appreciated cause again the clock is ticking!

"okay, i've got a plan..." peter said in a calculated manner. "but it's going to require some changes from you there big guy"

oh boy i thought... i was hoping peter would make this all go away nice and easy, and make things return to normal. well turns out that special talent agents can only do so much when it comes to being faced with a governmental menace...

peter said the march 31 requirements were the most important to deal with now... the rules can wait...

i need a "drastic public image make-over" peter thinks. we tyrannosaurs have a very terrible reputation, and as of such i need to overcome it if i'm to succeed here in new zealand, or anywhere...

as my blog is my "ambassador" to the world... wow suddenly i feel important... my blog is going to have to serve as the main means of convincing people that i'm not a brutal prehistoric killing machine.

to do this peter has a list of things i'm going to need to change so that the blog "reflects me as a person" this includes the following:

1. Add personal elements and touches to my blogs format
2. Start posting more of my personal thoughts and feelings
3. Start getting to know your audience and engaging them

so basically make my blog more about me... isn't it already about me though???

well who am i to argue with peter. i've got some ideas for #1. if you look along the sidebar you'll find that i've added a bunch of things about me. so check them out

even more important leave a comment people of the web-wide world, and let me know what you think of my new and improved blog!

i in the meantime am going to try and start meeting those 3 criteria...

the "man"... or rather the "state"

okay just when i thought everyone was over the "incident", and not mad at me anymore, i thought wrong...

it turns out that the new zealand conservation department had an alterior motive for driving me personally to my destination in the south... turns out we were making a stop at the otago bureau of the department...



i've never really understood the phrase "signing my life away"... that is till now...

so for me to live here in new zealand a whole new category of immigrant status had to be invented. as of 12:04 i'm now officially a

"Landed Extracontinential Organism"

(sounds kinda like an alien invasion movie title or something!).

the reason for this weird and scary sounding title, is that in the old days when people were moving here from overseas they brought a bunch of animals over that weren't supposed to live here, and they've caused quite a mess with the local environment...

what my new status is saying is that i'm an allowed foriegn species of animal, BUT that they'll be watching me closely (i'm kinda scarred... i've seen that movie 1984. they watched people in that all the time too, and bad stuff happened!!!... hopefully 23 years later those problems have gone away...) to make sure that i behave... in an ecologically friendly sense of the word behave...

because i'm the only member of my species living in new zealand there's a bunch of other stuff i have to do as well... apparently because there's only one of me (a tyrannosaurus rex traumadorius) i'm a nationally critical animal on their endangered species list. ie. i'm as endangered an animal as they come around here!


so because i'm so "threatened" the people in the department of conservation have given me a TON of that i must follow at ALL times from here on in...

Any individaul or population of tyrannasaurus rex traumadorius:

• A. May not engage in any behaviour or activity that might threaten individual's or population's well being or survivial

• B. May not engage in any behaviour or activity that will alter or disrupt New Zealand natural habitats, species, or ecosystems

• C. Must report to the DOC (Department of Conservation) any change in habitat, territory, or ecosystem within 24 hours of change

• D. May not breed within New Zealand without permission from the D.O.C.
  

• E. Must report any and all predation of native species to the D.O.C. (with a possibility of violation of clause B.)

• F. Must assist in research efforts at better understanding species biologic and conservation needs and issues

• G. Must cooperate with D.O.C. agents and officers in any capacity or function they deem necessary to protect New Zealand's environment

where's the fun in any of that?!? now i have to follow a bunch of directives like a stupid robot!!!

even worse due to my being considered "intelligent"...

at first i might add i was very happy they said i was intellegent! that is till i found out it lead to bad things! they decided due to my almost being smart that i wasn't just an endangered species, but also an immigrant.

as of such i have the following criteria from the department of immigration, and i have to meet them before march 31!!! AHHHHHHHH

• A permenant place of residence
• Stable employment
• At least 3 signed referals or endorsement

oh man... no pressure or anything, but if i don't get these 3 things by mar. 31 st their going to ship me back to canada!!!

well people of the web wide world i'm needing to go. things to do and all that... oh boy oh boy

wrong side of the road

okay so they finally let me out of quarantine today!!!

that's right i'm finally allowed to enter new zealand, and start trying to make a life for myself here...

there's just one thing... i don't know a thing about new zealand... including such things as where i am or more to the point where i can live...

i had been hoping that once i was over here i could just go and live with craig, just like in the good old days... but now thanks to bio-security i've been separated from craig, and i'm not even in the same town as him...

there is some good news though!

thanks to my status now as the ONLY dinosaur on the south island of new zealand the department in or conservation is legally supposed to take care of me... after all if something bad happens to me then there'll be NO more dinosaurs down here!

now that's what i'm talking about! a place that treats a t-rex right!!!

they weren't too happy about it though... i found out about it by accident while asking what sort of cool animals i can see around here... when they were talking about endangered animals they said they had to help these animals from going extinct. that made me think of dinosaurs, and i asked why they hadn't helped us... suddenly they were accusing me of being so clever for threatening them like that, and asked who i had told...

wait you think they thought that i'd thought that they thought that i thought that they thought that i thought... uh wait what was i saying again???

anyways now i'm being driven... that's right i'm not having to drive for once!!! i'm being driven to otago. which if i understand is where craig is right now... though i thought that he is in a place called dune-dine...

the weird part about this ride is that i'm in the same seat i would normally be in if i was driving back home... that's right these weird new zealanders they ride on the WRONG side of the road...

i missed much of the nice scenery since we set out cause i was freaking out... wasn't till 30min into the trip they finally told me that was normal... how was i too know?

oh well that was okay... soon i got my first view of the ocean since arriving... ah man i LOVE the ocean... after all it is what made me think to leave canada behind... i can't wait till i get a chance to go explore it in more detail...

wow there sure is a lot of it! still going on...

i'm being told we're getting closer to otago here people of the innerweb so i'm going to sign off for now... keep you posted once i arrive, and hopefully figure out a bunch of things like what am i going to do for a home, or work, and most important to make something of myself here...

Letters from Iwo Jima - 2006 - Film

Friday, February 09, 2007



There were two films I anticipated more than any other last year, and both were from Clint Eastwood. Flags of Our Fathers made my top ten of 2006, and the second installment of the Iwo Jima battle films, should I be allowed to revise my 2006 list 2 months into 2007, ranks even higher.

Flags has been criticized for being too patriotic, while Letters is less so. But I have a feeling the "patriotism" of the second is shadowed by the fact that it's a whole other national brand. Letters is done almost entirely in Japanese with subtitles. From an American standpoint I don't know enough about Japanese history and culture to label it patriotic, though it won't surprise me if someone from Japan thought it was. For me, Flags is easy to label as a salute to our soldiers, to our military past. Eastwood's not apologetic about that, nor should he be; he's from a generation that came of age in the War and post-War years, so you bet he's got an emotional attachment to the story, but I still don't think it's an empty patriotic nod. If it was such a flag-waving American myth that's come back to give us context for the war in Iraq, why the hell would he waste his time creating the same story from the Japanese perspective?

It's clear Eastwood is more interested in the all-around perils of this story, after all, taken together the two movies make either side out to be the enemy. I'd have to flip through my mental Rolodex of war movies to know for sure, but I believe Letters was the first time I was rooting against the Americans on the battlefield.



War movies are a tough sell to a lot of people because they're turned off by the violence, whether it's stylized or realistic. My big sister, for one, won't go near a movie where she might see blood. Surely this limits one's options, particularly nowadays when violence isn't violent unless we see the full motion of a limb being torn off, or blood spurting from the jugular. I for one prefer war movies and Westerns from the 30s, 40s, and 50s where if a character was shot up or stabbed, it was staged in a way that excluded a picture of their guts spilled across the sidewalk. What happens in many John Ford movies, for instance, is a shot of a character's face as he (or she—but usually he) looks at the massacre. The horror expressed on those characters' faces tells us a lot more than if we were to see the mangled body with our own eyes; gore takes on a deeper meaning when we see how characters react when they're looking at it. It means there's consequence to the imagery, rather than blood for the sake of blood.

Some of my favorite films happen to be some of the bloodiest: Taxi Driver is practically a gore flick as it climaxes, and continuing with Scorsese, The Departed was one of my highest ranked films of 2006. These are films, though, where the violence is not gratuitous; its characters are emotionally involved with the violence they see, or even participate in.

Likewise, Letters from Iwo Jima is violent enough to make your stomach turn, but it's not a hack 'em and slash 'em flick, it's an historical tale. War, by nature, is violent, bloody, putrid; in between the scenes of bombings, missile attacks, and soldiers set afire by flame throwers there is a very personal story that can't be told without it. Both Letters and Flags are personal memoirs as much as they are battle films. The flashback sequences in Flags to me, means just as much as General Tadamichi Kuribayashi's (Ken Wantanabe) words scrawled on paper in the letters he writes to his family during battle.

In Flags, the flashback is used for its characters to contextualize the victory at home against the nightmarish battlefield memories they can't shake. In Letters, the General writes letters home to help him walk though the hours of impending death. Neither side of this war story is emotionally victorious. Everyone's fucked up from the war. That's Eastwood's point, and it sure as hell transcends the real flag waving bullshit of post-9/11.

funny story...

hey there people of the web wide world. i know it's been a LONG time since i last posted, but i have a good excuse!!!

well you know how i was looking for a place without dinosaurs, and i found a few when i went to the library last month... well here's what roughly went down... the story must stay rough for, well, let's just say complicated reasons...

i can't say how exactly it happened, but SOMEHOW... though again i have NO idea how... i ended up SOMEHOW got lost in calgary after leaving the library, and ended up getting mixed up in craig's laundry...

for a number of reasons... most of them legal... i really can't for the life of me remember how this happened... fortunately with a brain the size of a peanut that is too be expected. phew or i'd be one dead meat t-rex right now...

now in my defense from all the allegations flying around as of late, craig SHOULD have checked his luggage more diligently!!! whose to say i didn't fall in there several days before he left as opposed to seconds before he grabbed his bags from the cars' trunk at the airport... i certainly couldn't say!

due to his affiliation with the tyrrell museum several countries customs didn't ask as to why he had a tyrannosaurus skeleton in his luggage... all but one, and here's where i got in a lot of trouble...

craig you see was heading to new zealand to try and become a teacher, and well new zealand it turns out is very picky as to what kinds of critters they do and more important DON'T let into their country...

they have a thing called bio-security that screens all incoming goods and luggage for intruding organisms... including dinosaurs it would appear... well sort of anyway.

they'd never seen a dinosaur before, but they recognized me as an undeclared predatory animal of some kind. man i don't think i've ever seen craig so surprised or mad at the same time before as when they opened his bag to find me, and i've done some stupid things before! now again i have NO idea how i got there. i certainly didn't sneak into his car the night before he left so i could catch a free ride to new zealand where there just happen to be no other dinosaurs... and they couldn't prove it.

craig was really mad at me... oops... but fortunately they let him off with just a stern yelling at...

he got off easy if you ask me, but when you hear his side of it you'd think i actually got him arrested as opposed to just threatened with it...

boy, at least he didn't have to spend the last MONTH in quarantine!!!

yeah since i was listed as a dependent of craig's, and he couldn't afford to fly me back to canada i was a landed pest... however since i could speak for myself they couldn't get rid of me the "usual" way... whatever that is. won't it be the same as flying me home?... new zealand customs deemed i could remain in the country...

so long as i wasn't a threat to their native environment... as of such i was locked up in a special building kinda like in a movie to make sure i didn't have a cold or something...

now i'm about to be released, and i can see about making a place for myself here in this new zealand...

Puccini For Beginners - 2007 - Film

Tuesday, January 30, 2007



Check out my review of Puccini For Beginners over at Four Magazine now!

Tears of the Black Tiger - 2007 - Film

Tuesday, January 30, 2007



My review of Tears of the Black Tiger (in theaters March 9th)is up now in Four Magazine! Check yourself before you wreck yourself, Cineastes!